Michele Eley's curiosity about German language and culture was instigated by a German exchange student who landed next to her in a high school band class. She spent the majority of her undergraduate studies as a STEM major taking German courses for fun and had wonderfully enriching (and ridiculously fun) study abroad experiences in Jyväskylä, Finland and Tübingen, Germany. German Studies won her over, and she earned a BA in German from UNC-Asheville and a PhD in German Studies from Duke University.

Her primary research areas are Black German studies and German film and television. Her current work is focused on narratives of German identity, whiteness, and Blackness in motion pictures and intersects with critical race and gender studies. She is also interested in curricular diversity, foreign language pedagogy, and critical media literacy.

Her teaching interests include film, 20th and 21st century cultural activism, translation, phonetics and morphology, syntax, and etymology.